Hellfire Patch v1.02.A5: Classic HF with less bugs and more polish!

[AJenbo]

The problems you experienced occur with vanilla Hellfire multiplayer (and exist in the original Diablo as well if you attempt to enable SP only quests in multiplayer); sadly the quest specific code responsible for generating items in the dungeons or from NPCs as rewards are not synchronized at all and cause problems.

Another issue with the SP quests is that the game doesn't properly track if a player is on a quest level or a normal level so you will see the other players appears on two levels at the same time. The worst affected quest level is The Unholy Altar, which is pretty critical

We have fixed the issue for town portals but need to extend the network messages to track this for the players.

Other than that it seems that mostly we just need to add NetSendCmdQuest() and NetSendCmdGItem() in a few key places.

There's also a bug with the Hive where the generation seed gets desync'd somewhere after creating the layout - many times in the Hive the players present will see identical level structure and paths, but the location of monsters, barrels, chests, and consequently every item they drop, is totally out of sync, which leads to a lot of monsters teleporting when activated on other player's screens, and nobody but the host can pick up items pre-placed on the floor or dropped by monsters/containers. Not really anything you can do but rehost and try again. It seems to happen less often if you visit one of the vanilla dungeons first before going to the Hive.

The good news is... if the host successfully picks up desynced quest/reward items, they can then drop the item and it will exist properly for other players who can see and pick them up. Excepting, of course, the ones that randomly vanish... I once had a very important item disappear in an Ironman game in vanilla Diablo, that was disappointing!

Hopefully some day we have an open source Diablo engine where all of the quests work properly in multiplayer. I spent some time working on them only to discover enabling them causes far more problems than I could fix.

Considering that we now do would you be interested in collaborating on solving this issue?

I have created a ticket in our issue tracker for dealing with this specific one:
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/issues/1112

---

It's true that there are other multiple mods. Tchernobog is one of the best, and it really includes a lot of new content and improvements, but it is focused in the multiplayer game, and there is nothing with camping, quest and lore. For play the original experience and have a great dive into the story, I think that yor mod is the best!

I would only suggest to make an improvement of the resolution. The original game resolution is poor for current computers, and an improved one (as in other mods) would be great and make the game more atractive.

I don't know how difficult could be to implement, but It would be the perfection of this mod.

I'm wondering if you could give some feedback regarding DevilutionX since this is pretty much the goal of our project.
1: Improve the engine
2: Fix bugs
3: Don't change the gameplay

In order for us to allow for the game to be resolution independent we had to change a lot of hardcoded values, so I'm not sure how feasible this would be for a hex based mod.